NASA Mars Exploration Program

NASA and NASCAR are both old hands in how to make drag work for them, whether it's hurtling through an atmosphere or around a racetrack. On Wednesday, NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson and NASA aerospace engineer Jill Prince took to a live online educational forum to dig into the ABCs of drag for students tuning in from Virginia to California. "Imagine you're alongside Jimmie Johnson in a race car and you put your hand out the window," said Prince. "That is drag. What you're feeling, that pressure on your hand, it's a force. And it's due to air resistance." Prince and her colleagues at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton had to figure out...

Related "NASA Mars Exploration Program" Articles

NASA and NASCAR are both old hands in how to make drag work for them, whether it's hurtling through an atmosphere or around a racetrack.
On Wednesday, NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson and NASA aerospace engineer Jill Prince took to a live online...

NASA has long had a strong working relationship with the world of sports car racing, spinning off space technologies that help make race cars faster and safer.
At noon on Wednesday, NASCAR star Jimmie Johnson will join NASA Langley Research Center...

NASA Langley Research Center is looking at an $829 million proposed budget for fiscal year 2016 — a healthy $60 million more than its 2015 enacted budget of $769 million, officials announced Monday.
All of that increase, however, plus millions more are...

That jelly doughnut on Mars? Not so much ...
NASA just announced that the jelly doughnut-shaped whatsis that its Opportunity rover camera captured recently is, in fact, a rock.
Researchers claim the weird specimen -- about 1.5 inches wide,...

Check this list often as new tips, events and deals around Florida come in:
New Bonaventure Resort & Spa summer specialThe new Summer Break Special at the Bonaventure Resort & Spa in Weston offers rates at 30 percent off standard pricing....

NASA has selected four veteran astronauts to lead the way back into orbit from U.S. soil. On Thursday, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden named the four who will fly on capsules built by private companies — SpaceX and Boeing. Each astronaut has test...

If slow and steady wins the race, then NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity takes first place. In March, more than 11 years after it landed on the Red Planet, the scrappy little robot completed 26.2 miles, or the length of a full marathon – and now you can watch...

Dry, dusty Mars once had an ocean that held as much water as the Arctic Ocean and covered a larger share of the Red Planet’s surface than the Atlantic Ocean does on Earth, according to a surprising new study.
The findings, described online in the journal...

It turns out the Beagle has landed after all — but it never called home.
The gone-but-not-forgotten spacecraft went AWOL on Christmas Day, 2003, when it was supposed to land on Mars and start transmitting data back to Earth.
Instead, the British-built...

The pilot of a small plane that crashed at a Los Angeles intersection was a NASA and Jet Propulsion Labs researcher who helped determine that there was once water on the surface of Mars, his colleagues said.
Alberto Behar, 47, of Scottsdale, Arizona,...

Billions of years ago, a lake once filled the 96-mile-wide crater being explored by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, bolstering evidence that the planet most like Earth in the solar system was suitable for microbial life, scientists said on Monday.
The new...

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has released the first resolved images of comet Siding Spring's nucleus -- and it's a lot smaller than people expected.
The nucleus of the comet that zoomed past the Red Planet on Sunday appears to be about half its...

A NASA robotic spacecraft fired its braking rockets on Sunday, ending a 10-month journey to put itself into orbit around Mars and begin a hunt for the planet's lost water.After traveling 442 million miles, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or...

A NASA spacecraft designed to investigate how Mars lost its water is expected to put itself into orbit around the Red Planet on Sunday after a 10-month journey.
After traveling 442 million miles from Earth, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution,...

They are literally specks of dust, tiny bits of primordial material that wouldn't be visible to the naked eye.
But for spacecraft in orbit around Mars, they could become minuscule agents of destruction.
These dust particles will come hurtling past the...

Unimpressed by Michael Jackson’s iconic moonwalk? How about a "Marswalk"? NASA’s Curiosity rover showed off its fancy footwork on the Red Planet this week by driving backward. The Mars Science Laboratory robot just finished its longest drive...

The saga of the jelly doughnut-shaped rock on Mars has taken a strange turn -- to a federal court.
On Monday, Rhawn Joseph, who describes himself as a neuroscientist and astrobiologist, filed court papers demanding that NASA do more to investigate the...

Scientists working on NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission have been somewhat sparing until now when describing exactly how the rocks drilled, gobbled and cooked by the Curiosity rover paint a picture of a life-friendly environment.
Well, no more. In a...

Think those tools aboard NASA’s rover Curiosity are only good for sniffing out argon isotopes and drilling into mysterious rocks? Wait till you hear this: A 'Happy Birthday' song played by Curiosity’s very own Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, marking...

This week in New York will.i.am — the founder and frontman of L.A.'s Black Eyed Peas — is to receive an honorary Clio Award in recognition of "the work and talent of those who push the boundaries of creativity in advertising and beyond,"...